We Need Serena Williams to Win the Grand Slam

We need Serena Williams to struggle. Every time she plays, in every single match, but especially during her current historic run, we need her to falter, to misplace backhands, smack some approach shots into the net cord, launch her rocket forehand into the stands, or gift her opponent a few double faults. We need her to start slow. We need her to be frustrated by her footwork. We need to see her scold herself for missing a shot, then demonstrate the proper technique in that way that looks like she’s running through her lines in a stage play. We need her to struggle to the point of losing it all.

We need this because, a few weeks shy of her 34th birthday, Williams has now dominated the game for half of her life. She is the oldest player to hold the No. 1 world ranking and is almost three dozen matches into an undefeated streak in the majors. If she manages to defend her title at the US Open, she will complete the first calendar-year Grand Slam in women’s tennis since Steffi Graf accomplished the feat 27 years ago (Graf was 19 at the time), and it will be her ninth consecutive victory in Grand Slam singles finals appearances, putting her past Pete Sampras in the record books. Her supremacy has become so thorough and pronounced that statisticians have had to employ complex, time-traveling models to argue whether she is the Greatest of All-Time or merely one of the greatest. But simple observation tells us that Serena Williams has become the light around which lesser bodies revolve. So we need her to struggle, because when she doesn’t, it isn’t even fair.

When she doesn’t, her matches feel like they barely break the monotony of regular life, or at least regular tennis. On form, she can dispatch top 20 players in little more than an hour. In the fourth round of the US Open, Williams swept aside the young American power-hitter Madison Keys in 68 minutes. If the average tennis match is about 17 percent actual tennis action, that is 12 minutes of Serena Williams doing what she does better than anyone. Her first-round match produced even less tennis. Williams won 32 of 37 points, and her opponent, Vitalia Diatchenko, retired after two games into the second set, after just 32 minutes, about five of which were tennis minutes. Diatchenko admitted to carrying an injury into the match, and it has been intimated that she hobbled out for the payday, but it is also possible she just wanted her moment in the sun as Williams streaked toward greatness.

When Serena Williams doesn’t struggle, as she didn’t in these matches, it feels almost as though we’re being robbed of precious time, time that we’ve allotted to watching Serena Williams, that must then be filled with something significantly less compelling than Serena Williams. Sometimes we still watch, as two other people play a sport that looks like the same sport Serena Williams plays but does not feel the same. They hit a ball back and forth over a net, often at great velocity, but the gravity seems somehow diminished. They grunt at each other, gesticulate toward the fans, and pillory the officials, like Williams, but the theater is not accompanied by her absurd feats of athleticism, like the running-cross-court-forehand-winner-into-reverse-jazz-split that Williams hit against her third-round opponent, Bethanie Mattek-Sands. As long as Williams is still in a tournament, these other matches fill the time until she plays again, and more often than not, we don’t watch. And this is what should trouble the tennis authorities most—that they can draw up the field however they want, but if Serena Williams is not there, does it really exist?

The players ranked beneath Williams simply do not offer what she does, during the actual tennis minutes or in between them. She has put so much space, both in terms of ability and personality, between her and the chasing field, that when she’s No. 1, it feels as though the rankings should skip to at least five or 10 before listing another name. By the third round of the US Open, eight of the 10 seeds below Williams had lost, and of the two left, Simona Halep (No. 2) and Petra Kvitova (No. 4), Halep hobbled through her fourth-round win with bandages covering large portions of her legs.

With the field weakened, it was left to the other Williams, Venus, to provide a legitimate challenge to her sister. Their quarterfinal was billed as an epic, but that ignored their on-court history. Of the Williams sisters’ 26 previous meetings, only ten had gone three sets. More important, those three-setters tended not to be the type of tight contests with long rallies and marathon lengths that one would associate with epic tennis. The Williams sisters know each other too well for that. Their head-to-head matches are usually nothing but winners and aces. It is tennis of the highest quality but rarely of the highest tension, and the 2015 version was no different. The circumstances certainly elevated the atmosphere of the match (Oprah was there!), but Serena and Venus did not play to the crowd—they just played fast.

Serena hit 35 winners to just 22 unforced errors; Venus, 24 to 15. Serena hit 12 aces; Venus, eight. There was very little net play, and the longest rally was a mere 13 shots. The match, which ended, 6-2, 1-6, 6-3 in Serena’s favor, lasted just 98 minutes, but at least most of it was actual tennis.

Serena Williams, and to a lesser degree her sister, is a master of time-less tennis. She does not want to be out there for long, and she does not play a style of tennis that lends to epic recollection when things go the way she has planned. She wants to win, and that is all. And this is why we need her to struggle. If Serena Williams did not struggle, she would win her seven matches at the US Open in fewer combined actual tennis minutes than it takes most of us to finish brunch. We need her to struggle so that this doesn’t happen, so that her internal battles create the illusion of competition. We need her to struggle because otherwise she’s a daydream.

This need of ours is selfish, of course. In the second round, Kiki Bertens went up 4-2 in the first set against Williams. The crowd at Arthur Ashe Stadium buzzed with delight. Not because they wanted Williams to lose, but likely because they knew what would happen next. As Williams gathered herself and climbed back into the match, the stands remained hushed, as if waiting for a signal of approval from her to cheer. At 4-5, she gave it to them, whipping a winner past Bertens and letting out a guttural roar that bounced off of the stadium’s brand-new roof structure. For the first time since its opening in 1997, Arthur Ashe felt like the grand yet intimate theater it always wanted to be, with 25,000 fans suddenly allowed to share Serena Williams’s struggle and scream in catharsis when she overcame it.

We do not share this struggle, nor have we earned the right to. Serena Williams has become a graceful champion of the game despite having to put up with sideways and head-on criticism of her body, her skin, her hair, her personality, her family, and her game for every one of the 20 years she’s been a professional. She’s spent half of her life struggling against our resistance to let her be Serena Williams, and yet she is still willing to let us join her as she strides proudly to the game’s pinnacle. Now that statistics are providing inarguable evidence of her status, we are finally recognizing what she’s meant to us all of those years, and we want to savor every moment of it. We want Serena Williams to win the calendar Grand Slam, and we want to imagine that she might just keep going until the record books show only her name at the top of every page. We want as much time with Serena Williams as we can get, now that we know who she is, and we know that the more she struggles to find her feet, or stroke the perfect backhand, or hit the perfect serve, or land that rocket forehand inside the back corner, the more of that time we’ll have. We need her to struggle, and then to come back for us, like she always does.